Some might say that we shouldn’t hold one mistake against a man, which is true. It’s all the other stuff as well.

Thanks to David for pointing this out to us. We long ago discarded the New Year’s honours list as a complete irrelevance. No offence to the lass, but we don’t really see the point of the monarchy and can’t get too worked up when its head hands out chunks of the alphabet.

Sehwag deserves a one-day record – not because he’s an exceptional one-day batsman, but because he’s an unforgettable cricketer. 15 hundreds in 240 matches is nowt to write home about for a one-day opener (Trescothick hit 12 in 123 matches, Upul Tharanga’s got 12 in 131). But 219? Hell, that warrants digging out the fountain pen and some coloured paper.

“Dear mum, played a top knock against the Windies today, so work’s going okay. Regarding the car, it seems to have stopped making that sound, so I’m just going to leave it and hope it’s sorted itself out. Finally, the cat had to have his teeth cleaned by the vet, which cost a bloody fortune – as usual – but he’s eating okay, so I think he’s fine as well.”

Retiring from cricket at the age of 40 is a bit like dying at a grand old age. People naturally focus on what’s fresh in the memory.

People remember your interests as being duck-feeding and ailment comparison with your peers, even though you were once a fighter pilot and later invented cling film.

This is the case with Dominic Cork, who’s developed a bit of an ageing rocker vibe about him, with his refusal to bow to age. The man’s had an entire cricket career since he finished playing for England.

But it’s his performances for England that we’ll remember, even though he played a lot less than you might think. He took 7-43 on his debut and took a hat trick a couple of matches later. Noteworthy achievements.

Significantly for us, he also played a major role against the West Indies in 2000. Cork’s blinding innings in the second Test really cemented our love for cricket. That’s how we’ll remember him.

Viagogo appeared to conclude that they were only selling more cricket tickets to women because some England players are good looking.

We asked our female readers whether they were buying tickets in order to ogle Jimmy Anderson while he stands at fine leg on the far side of the ground.

Female Cricket Fan said:

“Jimmy Anderson doesn’t field at fine leg.”

Case closed.

Apparently, they have seen a 240 per cent increase in females purchasing cricket tickets. Why might this be?

“Possibly inspired by Liz Hurley’s ‘passion’ for the game and Pippa Middleton recently spotted supporting her man in a local game, cricket is becoming more and more popular with women with some tickets currently trading on viagogo for up to £230. With reportedly the best looking team of England Cricketers to date, it seems young women are willing to pay a premium to be bowled over by more than just the action on the pitch.”

So, is that why you go to the cricket? Would you pay £230 for a chance to spend a few hours of your life ogling Jimmy Anderson while he stands at fine leg on the far side of the ground?

We also have issues with the term ‘DRS’. This is largely because it’s an abbreviation and we bloody loathe abbreviations. People think every second thing is important enough to warrant an abbreviation these days and it’s not the case. At least half of the abbreviations that are currently in common use are indecipherable to us and it really pisses us off.

An opaque abbreviation implies that elements of the speaker’s world are so important that everyone else should automatically be aware of them. We worked with somebody who once asked a customer whether their RSO had arrived. RSO meant ‘remote swap-out’ and the term had been coined in the office about a week before. The customer was baffled, obviously and we felt like stoving in our colleague’s stupid, self-centred head.

Abbreviations rapidly lose their original meaning as well. If you don’t believe us, we’ve already heard at least one person refer to ‘the DRS system’.

We didn’t do the names-in-a-carrier-bag draw in the end, because there were too many entries and we didn’t have enough ink.

We instead opted for the spreadsheet and random number generator approach and technology favoured Jill Russell.

Have fun, Jill. Kingfisher will be in touch.

Update: Kingfisher are giving away more tickets here. Presumably, for some of you, that page will be something other than one saying: ‘Hey, how come you don’t have a Facebook profile yet, you bloody-minded refusenik?’

Sanath Jayasuriya has finally bowed out of cricket just three days short of his 70th birthday. He departed how he had thrived, with a ferocious cut shot.

Asked to reflect on his career, Jayasuriya may or may not have said:

“Eh? What? Speak up. Why does everybody mumble these days? Is it too much to ask that people speak clearly and audibly? You’re all too busy playing with your iTelephones and Sony PlayMachines to enunciate properly. What’s the world coming to? Bring back conscription, that’s what I say.”

The runner serves a valuable purpose in cricket. He helps create the misunderstandings that give us the most entertainingly slapstick run-outs.

Run-outs are almost always hilarious. Watching professionals make a complete balls of the simple task of deciding whether to do something or not is funny; the ramifications afterwards are funnier still; and when there are three people involved and one of them has been hung out to dry by not one, but two of his team mates – well that’s just pure comedy gold.

Runners are never an advantage. The appearance of a runner is basically just an early warning system so that people don’t miss a memorable piece of rib-tickling theatre.

Update: We’ve written summat else about runners for Cricinfo.

We hate doing competitions. Sorting through all the entries sucks hours from our life and we always get stressed out that the winners aren’t going to receive their prizes.

This is a good one though.

You could win a pair of tickets for England v India at the Oval on Saturday the 20th of August (day three) and also a goodie bag of Kingfisher and cricket bits. (Pretty sure that’s Kingfisher the beer and cricket the sport, if you’re thinking that sounds a bit grisly.)

To be in with a chance of winning, answer the following question:

Which player top-scored with 110 not out in the 2007 England v India Oval Test?

Send your entries to king@kingcricket.co.uk, subject ‘Oval tickets’. The competition closes at the end of Sunday July 3rd and the winning name will be plucked from a Tesco carrier bag at some point that week.

We were also asked to say that we have teamed up with Kingfisher Beer for this, so that’s what’s happening in this last sentence.